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Valentin Savvich Pikul ((ロシア語:Валенти́н Са́ввич Пи́куль)) (July 13, 1928 - July 16, 1990) was a popular and prolific Soviet historical novelist of Ukrainian-Russian heritage. He lived and worked in Riga. Pikul's novels were grounded in extensive research, blending historical and fictional characters and often focusing on Russian nationalistic themes. Pikul's best-selling 1978 novel ''At the Last Frontier'' was a dramatized telling of Rasputin's influence over the Russian imperial court. Richard Stites says he was "a name hardly known to literary scholars but the most widely read author in the Soviet Union from the seventies to today (1991 )... Pikul's works were wildly popular in the book market (in the years 1967–1979 over a million copies were printed), but politically controversial because of his ardent patriotism which was sometimes expressed in thinly veiled Russian nationalism."〔Richard Stites, ''Russian Popular Culture'' (Cambridge UP, 1992, repr. 1995), p. 151.〕 According to Natalya Ivanova:
Little of Pikul's work has been translated into English. In May 2001 a seagoing minesweeper of the Black Sea Fleet was named in his honor. == ''The Requiem for Convoy PQ-17'' == This work by Pikul, published in the 1970s, describes the history of the Arctic convoys from the official Soviet point of view. The book starts with a brief description of the hunt for the ''Bismarck'', which corresponds more or less to current English-language sources available. Then, according to the book, the British Sea Lords were deadly afraid of the remaining battleship ''Tirpitz'', which was, according to Pikul, unmatched by any British battleship. So, when there was a threat of a ''Tirpitz'' sortie against Convoy PQ 17, the British Sea Lords ordered the naval escort of the convoy to scatter, abandoning the slower cargo ships and thus condemning many sailors from the convoy's cargo ships to death (the ships were mostly sunk by German submarines and air force). Nevertheless, according to the book, Captain Lunin on his K-21 submarine actually scored a torpedo hit on ''Tirpitz'', which caused the Germans to interrupt the sortie. The book gave strong emphasis on the distinction of brave Capt. Lunin, as compared to cowardly (according to the book) First Sea Lord Dudley Pound. According to the book, the low-rank sailors on British and U.S. ships were much surprised with Pound's order, since they expected and to be capable of quickly destroying ''Tirpitz''. This perfectly aligns with the following theses of the Soviet propaganda: * Soviet warriors are the bravest * in other nations, the low-rank people are good while the upper-rank ones are evil * the foreign policy of the U.K. and U.S. during the war was to interrupt the convoys in order to prolong the Soviet-Nazi war so that both the USSR and the Third Reich would be weakened to the maximum degree possible. Nevertheless, there are major doubts in the fact that K-21 actually hit ''Tirpitz''. Most English-language sources say "K-21 missed", and the log of the battleship has no mention of such a hit. According to Pikul, Lunin fired 4 torpedoes from the rear tubes, and then heard explosions, at least two of them were actually hits on ''Tirpitz''. Nevertheless, the German commanders, Admiral Schniewind and Captain Topp, just concealed the hits from SS, Gestapo and the Nazi leadership, in order to avoid the possible unjust punishment for not keeping the battleship safe. According to the book, there was some tension between the German professional sailors (of which Topp was one) and the Nazi party, SS and leadership, which was also enforced by the personal hostility between the two German admirals Erich Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy, and Karl Dönitz, commander of the German submarine fleet. Around 2003–2004, a movie was released in Russia based on the book, which also included the Soviet idea of K-21 actually hitting ''Tirpitz''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Valentin Pikul」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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